My name is Joe Boyd. I'm a husband, father, storyteller, pastor, filmmaker, improvisor, actor, author and a post-religious rebel pilgrim embedding myself into the story of an ancient Jewish homeless revolutionary.

Monday, November 21, 2011

My favorite Bible story probably shouldn't be in the Bible. I love the story of the woman caught in adultery found in John 8. I think that I have publicly told every story about Jesus found in the Bible. But there are a few favorites. For some reason many are found in John's gospel - healing the man born blind on the Sabbath, turning water to wine, etc. But my favorite is the woman caught in adultery. I have to be pushing 100 tellings of that particular story in my lifetime. To me, it is gospel in microcosm.

But, here's the thing I tend to gloss over about that section of Scripture. There is almost no chance that the story was in the original manuscript we label the book of John. I won't bore you with the textual and archeological evidence for it. (Because I really don't care to convince you one way or the other.) Most scholars would agree that the story was likely added to John's gospel about 100-200 years after it was written. Now, my non-believing friends tell me all the time the New Testament was constantly altered by monks and scribes with agendas throughout antiquity - implying that we can't trust the text preserved for us. I think this opinion is generally overstated and uneducated. We have so many late copies of the New Testament books that we can rest assured most all of it contains the authors' original message. This story however fails the test of Johannine authenticity on a few fronts - it is the only story in John that pits Jesus in direct conflict with the Pharisees, for instance. This is a common theme in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), but not in John. The story actually fits the style of the synoptic gospels much better. (In fact, some early manuscripts find the exact story inserted into the later chapters of Luke instead of John.)

I feel like the reason this story still exists in most all modern translations is for one simple reason - we like it too much to get rid of it. It is so full of gospel that we can't bear the thought of de-canonizing it. This is also why I believe it made its way in originally. The early church couldn't let the story of Jesus exist without this account documented somewhere.

My personal guess (and even though I am acting like a scholar right now, I really have no credentials) is that this was an oral tradition rooted in some historical event in the life of Jesus that was so important to the early Christians that it made its way into the written accounts of the gospel after the fact. For years this bothered me. How could my favorite story be an add-on addition? What does that say about its historicity or inspiration?

Then, out of nowhere, I saw it in a new way. At the end of John's gospel he says this...

"Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the King, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name...Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."

John gave us the stories we needed to receive life in Jesus. We have the gospel in full without the story in John 8. But the early church couldn't bear for us to be without it...so they filled in just one of the empty pages in one of the books that the world did not have room for. It makes me wonder if this story of Jesus had become such a part of the early gospel telling that it found its way in at any cost. Is the story Biblical? I guess it depends on how you define Biblical. Is it true? Absolutely. And when I think about it that way, it means even more to me.

Here is my latest imagining of this story...

He squatted. A drop of sweat fell from his furrowed brow and landed on the dusty ground. It was a hot day. Her wails of agony and embarrassment pierced his ears. Had he taken the time to listen closer, he would have heard his enemies chattering and his followers gasping. But all he noticed was his own elevated heart rate.

He was focused on his next move. This was not on the agenda today. He was to teach in the morning, have lunch with his friends, then move onto the next house that had been arranged for him. He looked forward to what he hoped would be a softer bed in the new house than the one he had used for the last several days. His back ached.

He glanced up. He was surrounded. At least a dozen of them encircled the girl and him. They wore smug faces and the clean garments of priests and professors. He felt his stomach turn sour. Sometimes he wished he couldn’t’ see through them.

His eyes fell to her. Naked. Curled in a ball. Bleeding from her knees and face. She wept. Her fear overcame him. Anger boiled in his soul toward her accusers. She was only a pawn in their game. But she had a name…a story…and maybe even a future.

His eyes fell back to the ground. Instinctively he began to draw with his finger in the sand. Meaningless scribbles helped him think. Then he grinned ever so slightly. Like that moment a puzzle is solved in the mind.

“Well?” one of them spoke. It was the young brash one who had thrown her down by her hair. “What do we do with her, Rabbi? Moses says stone her. What do you say?”

His eyes didn’t go to the inquisitor. They stayed on her. She was curled nude in the fetal position. Like a baby abandoned at birth.

“We should stone her,” Jesus said. She shrieked. He was her last hope. “But we will do it right,” he continued. He only looked at her. “The one of us who is without sin will throw the first stone.”

Silence. Nothing but her whimpering. Just a thud as the oldest priest dropped his stone to the ground. Then another. And another. Then, like popcorn hitting that perfect temperature, they all began to fall. The young zealot was the last to leave. He turned and stormed off.

Finally, the teacher moved his eyes from her. They had all left. Only a few of his own disciples remained. They stared at him shocked. Confused. Speechless.

He removed his outer garment and walked to the girl. She couldn’t have been more than 17. The same age as his youngest sister. He covered her and lifted her chin with his finger. Again, he squatted.

She looked at him.

He wiped the tears from her eyes. Then the blood from her nose. “Where are they?” he whispered. “Your accusers are gone.” He looked past her eyes into her soul. “And I don’t accuse you either,” he said. “Now go, but stop sinning like this. It is destroying you.”

McKnight is an author whom I have never read, but I have seen his name bantered about from time to time. I had briefly reviewed his 2010 article in Christianity Today that thoughtfully tackled an issue I have often struggled with - the congruity of the gospel of Jesus and the gospel of Paul.

Around a decade ago I read Dallas Willard's book The Divine Conspiracy. It was through that book that I first encountered the gospel of Jesus Christ. That may seem odd to say. I had been a Christian my entire life, graduated from Bible College and been a pastor for five years before reading it. My life could easily be divided into pre-Willard and post-Willard. Willard showed me that the gospel was the Kingdom come - not just sin management.

(Side note: I think The Divine Conspiracy is beginning to loom as a pivotal once-in-a-generation work in modern Christianity. Many evangelicals of my generation look back on that book as a kind of secret passage leading to a more Kingdom-centered tangible expression of Christianity.)

From Willard I found many other authors ready to aid in my exploration into this new and improved gospel - thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas, Will Willimon, John Howard Yoder, Hans Kung, and N.T. Wright. Over time, N.T. Wright rose about them all as a trusted voice - even beyond Willard in many ways. Wright just seemed (and seems) a half-step ahead of so many of us. (The irony that an Anglican Bishop in England has become the patron saint of post-modern post-evangelicals in America is beyond explanation to me.)

When I picked up The Jesus Gospel I immediately noticed that it had two different forwards - one by N.T. Wright...the second by Dallas Willard. How could I not read on?

I hope this doesn't seem somehow conceited, but what I felt while reading McKnight's book was an intense measure of agreement and thankfulness. Reading, particularly reading theology, is often best when you find an author who stretches your common perceptions and assumptions. That is what Willard, and later Wright, did for me. Certainly, McKnight did that for me in stretches through this book. But it wasn't so much the head-tilting moments that won me over as it was the head-nodding moments. With nearly every paragraph I found myself thinking, "Good, someone else sees it that way too...and someone smarter than me. Maybe I'm not crazy, after all!"

I feel like, for instance, I am constantly harping on my evangelical friends about the danger of over-emphasizing personal salvation. McKnight confirmed in me that my prophetic instincts in that regard are grounded. The gospel is not fundamentally about your sin problem. It is about Jesus...and more specifically about Jesus being Israel's Messiah and the rightful Lord of the entire cosmos.

When in doubt as a "preacher," I tell stories about Jesus - or about his people, Israel. McKnight encouraged me that what I am doing is pure gospel proclamation. In short, he confirmed for me that gospel is what I have come to think it is - simply Jesus as King. He is the good news. His life, death, resurrection and appearances in the context of the story of Israel is what changes everything. Those of us who believe his story are sent to proclaim it as historical testimony. We don't have to persuade people to action. We just tell the story and the story does the work. It is good news. Perhaps more accurately, he is good news.

I rarely use this blog as a commercial, but I unashamedly encourage you to buy this book. It may do for you what The Divine Conspiracy did for me ten years ago.